DISCUSIÓN Y COMENTARIOS:

A frequent objection to globalisation is one that complains that its proponents do not appreciate the value of the lives of many in the undeveloped world, and they argue that

chapter three, and in section 3.3. Critics who make this objection against globalisation agree that poverty is a massive problem, but they take as an assumption that globalisation is a force for evil, because they see globalisation as replacing an old and better way of life with a new life of

poverty. This assumption is largely prevalent because of the confusion between relative and absolute poverty, which creates the false impression that globalisation is making poverty worse, because it often appears to be increasing inequality, and as we have seen, once the confusion is resolved, this assumption is false. However, because of that false assumption, opponents of globalisation are able to rely on the following often implicit reasoning.

1)Globalisation is changing the way that people live in undeveloped countries so that they are becoming westernised; i.e., they are adopting free market economies, industrialising, and moving to urban environments.

2)Poverty is getting worse because of this process; i.e., the people‟s lives are worse. (false assumption)

3)However, in many economic terms, (GDP per Capita for example) these countries are improving.

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4)Therefore, the way of life in which these people used to live must not have been captured properly by these economic analyses, and it was wrong for the people living in those countries to lose their culture.

Saul in The Collapse of Globalism writes the following:

Meanwhile, a growing number of highly respected figures speaking outside of the Western democracies are turning their backs on theoretically scientific interpretations of global success such as trade statistics and cumulative GDPs. What they see are real people whose actual standard of living apparently must drop in order for them to appear to rise in

Western-style statistics[....]These people may have been living a life beyond such measures –perhaps rural lives. They are therefore technically existing on zero income. Then they move to a desperate urban slum where dirty water, sewage and alienation are the norm. But in such a place, even a dollar‟s worth of income can be measured. And so Western

measurement systems say they have taken a step forward and upward.106

The position takes the airs of superior tolerance, which is perhaps cultural relativism‟s only virtue, or indeed yet another of its many vices. It purports to ask, who are we to tell others in faraway lands how they should live? And then it answers this rhetorical question with supreme humility: we are indeed in no position either to prescribe or proscribe how others should live and to presume that our values are universal. However, buried beneath this veil of humility is extreme paternalism. The view itself assumes that these people, who used to live such idyllic “– perhaps rural lives” – need us to remind them of this fact. Alas, according to these critics,

unfortunately we are too busy measuring these peoples‟ rising GDPs to find the time to point out to them that they are so much less happy than they used to be.

This dispute can be put to rest easily. If we assume that people are for the most part rational (as I do), then we can see how preposterous the claim that, for example, urbanisation is not a force for good, but indeed the opposite, is. Rational people don‟t move to the city and immediately forget the lives that they left behind, so they also don‟t stay in the city if the lives that they left behind were clearly better than their new ones. From afar it may be surprising that people choose to abandon their rural subsidence farming lives to move to the slums of nearby cities just to have the privilege of working in sweat shops for pennies an hour, but that is only because we compare the lives that they are moving to, to our own lives and not to the rural lives that they were previously living. Clearly, subsistence is not all that it is cracked up to be, if the life in slums is superior to it, and if we accept that, then that is even more reason to support the industrialisation of agriculture.

Thus, I reject the objection that globalisation is unconscionable cultural imperialism. It is certainly true that there is a considerable cultural shift throughout the world, and countries are certainly becoming more westernised, adopting free market systems and industrialisation, but

this shouldn‟t be lamented in itself, indeed it should be celebrated. Cultural imperialism is evil when the change in culture that results from it is being intentionally imposed by the powerful upon the weak and against their will. However, this is not the case with globalisation, or it certainly doesn‟t need to be the case. While famously the IMF and The World Bank do put stringent conditions on their aid and loans, the vast majority of globalisation occurs naturally as market forces favour efficient practices such as mass production, industrialisation and the division of labour. It is this force that primarily is responsible for the westernisation of the developing and undeveloped world and it is further evidence that globalisation should be favoured, because the fact that people are adopting these practices inherent to globalisation, is evidence of its virtue, not its sinister intent to destroy their cultures.